‘If there’s a million different choices, your chances of making the right choice are one in a million.’

Zeeshan Syed

Web developer with design firm

This story is part of the 2013 Atkinson Series: Me, You, Us. Journalist and author Michael Valpy has done an investigation into social cohesion in Canada — what binds us together, what draws us apart.

You can call it a quirky location for an exploration of Generation Y’s place in the national character: Massey College in the University of Toronto, cut from the same tweed of Upper Canada’s WASP establishment (Hogwarts gowns and port wine and snuff after high-table dinners) as its founding master, Robertson Davies.

Pretty much the last place in the country to contemplate nihilism.

Who knows what Davies, the celebrated Jungian playwright and novelist, eyebrow gothically arched, would have made of the conversation in his college’s upper library: six thoroughly postmodern Canadians in their early 20s beginning a two-hour discourse by talking about whether the Facebook lives of themselves and their acquaintances are different from their real lives or merely an extension of them.

The business of constructed lives Davies would have got.

But the rest? The participants’ expedition into what holds them together or doesn’t, their sense of collectivity, their notion (those who consciously have one) of Canadianness, their jettisoning of national institutions that don’t operate at the same speed and with the same flexibility as they do, their struggle with the freedom of endless options and scant rules?

This is the reality and the presence of young, cosmopolitan, university-educated, contemporary Canada, assembled at a table in Massey’s library to talk about social cohesion — Tina Yadzi and Aftab Mirzaei, whose parents emigrated from Iran; Elizabeth Heller, whose background is Hungarian Jewish; Karen Zhou, first-generation Chinese-Canadian, Zeeshan Syed, whose parents came from Pakistan; and Karim El Rabiey, Canadian-born son of an Egyptian diplomat.

They belong to the mystery generation, their collective identity as much an uncertainty to themselves as to others. They are Gen Y, the Millennials, the largest population cohort to come down the demographic highway since the Boomers, and their behaviour and attitudes (in counterpoint to the Boomers) are polarizing Canadian society more profoundly than anything the country has known in decades.

Unlike young Boomers who distinguished themselves in the Sixties and Seventies by their radical political engagement, the Millennials are radically disengaged, radically antipolitical. Not apathetic, as we’ve come to realize, but radically disconnected.

Social scientists have been watching them withdraw from formal democratic participation for nearly two decades, not just the alienated and the angry, the so-called Spectators that David Herle identified in his study of segmented Canadian society, but an entire generation.

Their values are the antithesis of the social-conservative values of older Canadians, who elect Stephen Harper’s government and who champion moralism and certainty over reason and knowledge, champion religious faith (the greatest single determinant of who will vote Conservative), champion respect for law and order, tradition and belief in family as society’s most important social institution.

Yet because Millennials choose not to vote, they’ve handed the country over to a gerontocracy whose political values they find almost meaningless.

They believe, rightly, that government and public institutions favour the old.

They are the product of Western society’s overall shift from the more communal to the more individualistic. Their feeling of national identity has diminished as the state has withdrawn from Canadians’ lives over their lifetimes, says University of Calgary Yvonne Hébert, who studies issues of youth identity.

They have become unhooked from the state nationalism that’s been the benchmark of Canadian identity since Confederation, a state nationalism shaped by what governments do, shaped by Canadians’ dialogue with their national institutions such as transcontinental railways and the CBC, medicare and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, official bilingualism and multiculturalism.

In fact, the last — multiculturalism, seen by so many older Canadians as their country’s signal postwar achievement — is largely unimportant to them for the simple reason that they live it.

“Human migration is a tale as old as time,” says Karen Zhou, who plans a career as a writer. “Maybe because of technological advances you can have this happen now in quicker real time, but I think multiculturalism is a ridiculous notion.

“I think for some reason people feel the need to categorize the degree of diversity as something special but there is no human society that’s ever in my opinion had the same genetic code, the same hair colour. I think it’s just a ridiculous cultural construct.”

Karim El Rabiey nuanced her answer: “I moved here when I was 21 (about two years ago). For the longest time the only thing I attached to my Canadian heritage was my passport, which enabled me to travel more easily than my Egyptian passport. But then I moved here and started noticing things; I think multiculturalism does exist but it’s not something that should be held in high regard or low regard. It’s a fact that there’s many first-generation and second-generation immigrants here and that’s what it is.”

So that’s where we are.

The Millennials are the most ethnically diverse generation Canada has ever had. They are the best-educated generation. They are the first generation to have more women than men obtain post-secondary credentials.

In so many ways — something that their older fellow citizens don’t adequately appreciate — they are pioneers. They have different attitudes to community, privacy and authority than their older fellow citizens. They are more secular than previous generations. They do represent a widening generational gap on core values. They grew up digitally.

Thus, it’s not accidental that Tina Yadzi, who with her new undergraduate degree recently started working for a global advertising company in Dubai, began the conversation on her generation’s sense of its collective identity by talking about the role social media plays in their lives.

“Digital media,” she said, “is where people can act” — sparking a 30-minute conversation that ranged across social media protocols of etiquette and the construction of artificial online existence to whether social media enhances or detracts from meaning in life and what responsibility has to be taken for statements posted online for the world to see.

This is what pioneering is about. Facebook materialized as recently as 2004.

Aftab Mirzaei, planning on graduate school in psychology, said: “You build this entire other self (on Facebook), you display what you want, you display your happiest times. ‘This is what I did, this is what I look like, this is what I ate, these are the books I read, these are the films I watch.’

“You pick exactly what you want to show to people. You build this, and the problem is that people start identifying with that self. They kind of forget. They get their virtual self mixed up with their real life and they stop the introspection of working on themselves because their pictures are looking good.

“And it’s so sad — I see it in people’s mums. I think, ‘You know, you should be wiser than that, you’ve had three children, been through all of life, you forget that that’s not real life.’ ”

Zeeshan Syed, who at age 23 runs a web development and design company with his partners, talked about the artificialness and emotional detachment of what’s been termed clicktivism, the click of a mouse on a validating “like” as a vehicle of social interaction.

Said Syed, “Say I’m in a room with all 600 of my Facebook friends, and if I said ‘I did this,’ everyone would go, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ ” In comparison, on Facebook, he said, in response to the same announcement — a status update, in Facebookese — they might comment on it with a “like.”

“But I’m wondering if that emotional aspect is still there. I don’t think it would be as possible.” So the question: what gets lost in this human interaction?

Elizabeth Heller, a graduate in philosophy from University of Guelph, quoted the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt, that to be authentic and have a meaningful and valuable life, you have to become active in meaningful interaction with people.

“It would be a mistake to overlook the impact of social media,” said Heller. “I think it detracts in some sense from our ability to engage in a real life. There’s a distance that’s implied by social media that we haven’t maybe thoroughly examined.”

Then she makes the connection between Arendt’s words and political disengagement. “The idea of your identity being linked to the nation you’re a part of, that’s inherently a meaningful link,” she said. “And our age group is essentially politically inactive.”

They have such shining promise.

And yet they are afraid, most of them, very afraid, for their economic futures.

Around the table in the library of Massey College, Zeeshan Syed and Karim El Rabiey are economically confident. They both work in software. Tina Yadzi has at least temporarily left the country to find full-time work. Aftab Mirzaei says candidly she’s pessimistic. Karen Zhou and Elizabeth Heller aren’t planning on being materially successful.

The Conference Board of Canada ranks Canada no better than ninth out of 16 peer countries in dealing with joblessness among young people (which only marginally declined, according to the latest statistics, because so many young Canadians have given up and withdrawn from the labour market).

Youth unemployment has not budged since the 2008 recession — the most severe recession since the 1930s — and virtually no federal government programs have been created to target youth joblessness.

Young Canadians have tried hard to adjust to the labour market that confronts them. They’ve delayed marriage, delayed children, acquired more and more education. None of it is helping. They’ve concluded that theirs will be the first generation not to do better than the previous generation.

They find a job market cluttered at the far end with entrenched Boomers immersed in morphing freedom-55 into freedom-75 and beyond. Those still in school increasingly find only one means — borrowing — to move up the social-class rungs, and their belief is weakening that post-secondary education is worth the ever-mounting debt associated with its achievement.

Canadian employers are not giving them the crucial work experience needed to make them appealing for full-time employment, with the result that what skills they do have are in danger of atrophying the longer they go without work.

And Canada trails most peer countries in spending on active labour market programs such as training and skills development.

The Conference Board reports that Canada has not improved its ranking on absorbing young people into the labour market for over three decades.

It facilitates the training of far fewer skilled trades workers than the economy requires. In 2010, only 6 per cent of upper-grades secondary school students were enrolled in vocational or prevocational programs, the lowest rate among peer countries from which data is available (in nine peer countries, more than half of upper secondary students were in vocational programs) while Canadian businesses press government to allow skilled trades workers into the country who have been trained elsewhere, thus sparing Canada the cost.

All of these differences place young and old Canada in conflict.

The young don’t see the old reaching across the age divide in intergenerational solidarity — offering investment in young Canadians and their pursuit of education and jobs in return for their obligations to finance the home care, health care and pensions for the old.

Thus what generational tensions may mean for the future of social cohesion in Canada is unknown, but they point to politics being highly suspect as a tool for meeting the challenges of the 21st century and holding Canadians together.

“Formal institutions that have been respected in the past are too large and too inflexible to adjust quickly enough,” said Karen Zhou. “I know the federal government is designed not to be able to be changed too quickly so it doesn’t destabilize anything, but I just think that’s part of the problem.

“I have unprecedented access to critical views of every single structure around me, and I don’t have to take anything at face value, not religion, politics, government, corporations. I think this is related to my future prospects for employment and the traditional ideas of this have not gone unquestioned, unnoticed in our generation. I don’t see my future employment being dictated by family or religion or corporations or what society expects of me as a woman.”

Mirzaei calls it a shape-yourself world. “You will do best building your own package,” something she says may be problematic in training to be a clinical psychologist, which is her goal.

A new shape-yourself world is something else that may not sufficiently register with older Canadians.

“One thing I find very threatening about our contemporary situation is the vastness of opportunity and potential that arises out of all these things like social media,” said Heller. “Like everything is so much more possible. One of my instructors described it as, say you get a menu and you can pick between macaroni or steak, but imagine you get a menu that just keeps going and going and going, and to decide what you do want on a menu like that — because that’s so threatening and disorienting, you realize you have so many opportunities — it almost makes you delirious, makes your head spin.”

Said Mirzaei: “There’s not enough structure for you to make decisions properly, with values. There’s so much leeway with everything. You need some limitations to play the game. I want limits on my choices: If you do this, these are your options.”

The disappearance of religion, she said, had helped denude her generation of models. It was not a statement that found much agreement.

And Syed: “If there’s a million different choices, your chances of making the right choice are one in a million. If I don’t get it, what will my parents think, what will my friends think, I’ll never get married, I’ll never have kids, my life is ruined, I’ll just be homeless on the streets. I think there’s fear when people have all these different choices.”

And no guides. The absence of guides is an absence of intergenerational social cohesion but because the millennials are in so many ways pioneers they’re inherently short of guides.

Mirzaei, after reflection, said: “I don’t know if having fewer choices is any better. I like having choices because the limits of possibility are greater. Having that fear pushes me forward.”

“Do you know,” asked Heller, “how many vast hours just get poured and poured into staring at a screen pressing Wikipedia links? Your time just disappears and I think that in some sense detracts from our ability to see ourselves and become aware of our perspective.”

The conversation, as it wound down, slid back to Canadianness and multiculturalism.

There seemed a kind of awkward reluctance to talk about the former, but Yadzi came through with a perfect mythological response:

“I spent a lot of my adolescence travelling and living in Iran and I always felt like having a Canadian identity let me present myself as liberal, open-minded, tolerant. It’s a little bit elitist because of how Canadians are perceived in other countries: ‘Oh, you’re Canadian, not American.’ I think that Canadian society has a sensitivity to different identities and different feelings.”

Syed said he was called a Paki growing up and found that offensive. Now he treats it as a joke — “In my homeland of Canada I just brush it off; it doesn’t mean anything to me any more” — and smiles when he’s referred to as the brown bald guy.

Here’s what is new on the multicultural agenda:

A black man and a redhead girl walking down the street hand-in-hand, no one notices, said El Rabiey. “But I’m ashamed that I notice two guys or two girls walking down the streets holding hands. You think to yourself I wish I hadn’t noticed that.”

“I don’t think I should notice that two guys are holding hands,” said Aftab Mirzaei. “I register that and yet I try to rein it in. It’s a disconnect between your values and your visceral reaction.”

Mirzaei joked about being called exotic and said she wasn’t sure whether she found it offensive. Then she said: “If you look at us around the table any one of us could be called exotic.”

Heller asked her: “What’s your frame of reference from which to regard other things as “other” and therefore exotic? You have to have some definitive context in order for you to regard something as “other” enough in order for it to be exotic.”

Such a cool, useful generation.

Award-winning journalist Michael Valpy is this year’s recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. He can be reached at michael.valpy@utoronto.ca

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